Hello Writers!
It's been a lovely day here, busy and bright, and I'm taking a break from a project that I thought would take me a couple of hours. Alas, it's approaching three and I haven't started the main bit, not to mention the clean-up afterwards. Sigh.
Anyhoo, I haven't been writing much lately, either here at Write On! or by my solitary self. But it's getting lighter out, with occasional spring-like days (hooray for today) and the robins and who knows who else are back and chirping at early-o-clock every morning. The sap is flowing, and the writing will return.
What I have been doing is reading. Hop below the squashed Easter egg with me and let's talk family and character or just plain family characters.
I went to see a friend in a nice warm, dry climate over spring break a few weeks ago and the dear woman couldn't stop talking about Outlander. Which I had never read. I possibly have some excuses (not quite my genre, graduate school, kid, more graduate school). I chalk it up mostly to having read too many christian bookstore "historical" novels in middle school and early high school and having thoroughly exhausted my interest in anything remotely resembling those, ahem, dubious works of literature around the time Diana Gabaldon's Outlander came out. My fate was sealed when on the last night of my visit, my friend received the next DVD in her Netflix que: Outlander. We watched two episodes, and I was hooked on the story. So, to the library with me once I was home, and in a couple of days I'd plowed through Outlander.
After that marathon, which I truly enjoyed, I was scrounging for something else and came back across Deborah Harkness and A Discovery of Witches which I'd seen and been intrigued by a few years ago, but declined to pick up because it showed signs of being a trilogy. Well, trilogy complete, present and accounted for at the library, so onwards! I finished it this week and have a request on the next one...
These two books have gotten me thinking about family in my own writing. In each of these stories, the main characters don't stand alone; they're tangled in family intrigues or in creating new family ties, and yet at the same time the authors clearly show how the main characters have been shaped by their family members. Dougal and Collum MacKenzie in Outlander shelter their outlaw nephew, but clan politics put Jamie's life at risk; Claire has no family but the husband she's unwittingly left behind but makes new connections (as well as enemies) with alacrity. In A Discovery of Witches, Diana's Aunt Sarah and her partner Emily are larger than life characters even though they're on a separate continent and don't physically show up on stage until two-thirds of the way through the book. Family runs deep in both of these books and because of these strong connections, we see how family has shaped the main characters and how family connections constrain our heroes' current actions.
So for tonight, let's find a family character for our Togwogmagogean friends to react to. All the embarrassing stories come out at family reunions; someone's bound to have something juicy on the Callow Youth or Stout Companion; or is it that one relative who's always looking for a favor? Even Froop can get in on the action -- why's that guy so mean?
If you'd like a prompt, here are a few fluffy ideas:
* International superspy James Bunns' younger brother is giving him a hard time about missing the family reunion.
* Adelaide's mother had heard about her latest encounter with Lord Posthlewaite-Praxley (pronounced Puppy).
* Cal stutters in front of the family matriarch
* The Jewel of Togwogmagog having gone missing from our heroes' knapsack, unexpectedly shows up in the family dining hall.
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